I need some help finding a distro for a very old machine.
It’s my family’s old desktop with 2001 components (bought in 2004) and a Pentium CPU that is NOT i686. I checked the exact model and architecture once but I don’t remember it now. The only thing I remember is that it’s not i686 so 99% of modern 32 bit distros don’t work on it (stuck right after grub).
The machine has 1 Gb of DDR1 RAM though so I think it may be useful or at least fun to play around with.
Now it’s on Windows XP that runs quite well but doesn’t support modern SSL certificates so it can’t browse the internet (idk how to fix it ok?).
Are there any Linux distros or other operating systems (preferably not deprecated) that I can install on it? And btw it does have bootable USB support.
What 32 bit distros have you tried? I would think most would still support Pentium as kernel support has not been removed.
AntiX and Q4OS are both decent choices.
For a machine that limited, I would probably give Damn Small Linux a shot:
https://www.damnsmalllinux.org/
It is Debian based ( actually AntiX ) and so it has access to the full Debian universe ( 32 bit at least ) but has a curated list of applications well tailored to low-resource environments.
Some have said Debian is i686 only but this is what Debian says:
https://www.debian.org/ports/#:~:text=Debian supports all IA-32,)%2C%20Cyrix%20and%20other%20manufacturers.&text=Port%20to%20the%20little%2Dendian,ISA%20and%20hardware%20floating%2Dpoint.